I am Possible

[strange_aeons]

I know nothing of texture. At least, not in Photoshop. I can do texture fine in pastel, but with pastel I've got the paper working for me. I can't do that in Photoshop, because it looks bad: I'm not about to hit my machine with a texture the size of the canvas (considering that the canvas is never less than a thousand pixels square), but if I use one that's any smaller, the tiling is obvious. Anyway, it feels like cheating. I can't use Painter with this damn video card, so I'm stuck with Photoshop, and painting even in Photoshop 7 is far more analagous to working with oil paint than with pastel. Unfortunately, I don't know from oils, so I'm forced to read everything ever written on the subject of digital paint, and when that's done, to just feel my way through.

By now, you've probably noticed the two images in this post. I'd put them behind a cut tag, but as they will increase your load time by all of about eight seconds if your transfer speed never breaks 3k/s, I'm not overly concerned. I was going for concrete, but I think the effect I got is closer to sandstone, in no small part because I've never actually seen concrete that yellow. Whoops. Anyway, if you direct your eyes to the left, you'll see a detail at original size. Sloppy, but it's not really meant to be viewed at that size. Next time I should toss in some graffiti to liven things up; this one took me all of about twenty minutes, so I'm pretty sanguine about it. I finished it not a moment too soon: the kitten took up residence on my stylus hand shortly after I saved the file. No more painting tonight, apparently.

If I'm going to be doing art now, I really ought to pick up that stained glassy, art nouveau thing with the really harsh CMYK palette I was working on before the WIP ate me. Somebody remind me to work on that.

Comments

[oneironaut.livejournal.com]

Anyhow, the sandstone look is nothing that can't be easily fixed in post-processing. Drop all the saturation values by 31 points, and you get the nice concrete on the right.

Yeah, but that's, like, cheating! Actually, I would have, except I don't think it has enough texture for concrete -- it doesn't look porous, it looks like a relatively smooth surface that has dings in it. And cracks, obviously.

(Well, ok, I also tried adding a reinforcing bolt thingy, but it didn't come out nearly as nice as your concrete. Sigh. I suspect it's got the same problem as my realspace charcoal art -- too wimpy on the variation between the lights and darks.)

I have that problem too. Or had. Something. I don't know if this will work for you, but I find it helps me to, before I start, pick a darkest dark and a lightest light that are very dark and light, respectively, and force myself to actually use them. In practice, they wind up getting scribbled over, and I virtually never use full-opacity anything, so the rgb(36,15,3) and rgb(255,223,147) I picked for the concrete (sandstone, whatever) probably don't appear anywhere in the image, but I still got good contrast.

Meanwhile, speaking of video cards ... what sort of system do you have; what kind of video card does it need? If you keep complaining about this one, I'm liable to have to send you a better one so you stop! *grin*

I am so good. You have no idea how many goods and services I've gotten out of people who are just tired of hearing me piss and moan.

Actually, part of the problem is that the slots on the case and the slots on the motherboard don't match up, so I won't be able to get a new video card without replacing one or the other. Preferably the motherboard, because it's a shitty motherboard and I like this case. The motherboard is a ... well, the box isn't being very specific, and I can't find the documentation, but there are my copies of Savage Garden and Come On Come On, I've been looking for those ... well, if keeps' memory serves me, it's a Biostar M7VKG (http://www.biostar.com.tw/products/mainboard/socket_a/m7vkg/index.php3).

... and it's just come to light that it has an AGP port, something that managed to escape both Keeps' and my notice when I was actually building this machine. Sweet.